FREDERICK FLIPS: This NCAA champion from Stoughton has a huge social-media following

Even from his earliest childhood days, Frederick Richard has always swung from the high bar.

A Wicked Local story from 2014 covered Richard qualifying for the U.S. National Development gymnastics team at 10 years old. At the time, his hometown of Stoughton knew his story. Not many others.

Nine years have passed, and that's no longer the case.

Richard, now a freshman on the University of Michigan men's gymnastics team, has amassed over 581,000 followers on TikTok (with 21.4 million total likes across his videos) and 137,000 on Instagram under the online alias "FrederickFlips."

A nonchalant TikTok post in the midst of the COVID-19 quarantine evolved into social media stardom in short time, as Richard now retains an audience that witnessed him flirting with NCAA history in his first season with the Wolverines. (More on that shortly).

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“I felt like I didn’t have much of an impact on the world. Like, if I disappeared, no one would really know that I existed," Richard said. "It kind of sounds sad. I wasn’t sad about it, but I was like, I want to change this."

“When COVID ended and I got back in the gym, I realized, ‘Wow, I wish people could hear my story and see what I’m doing. Why don’t I try to take advantage of this opportunity?’ So I jumped into it the same way I push in gymnastics," said Richard. "I started reaching thousands and I got crazy excited. Then it reached millions, and I was like, ‘Woah, this is crazy.’”

And his story is still in the early chapters.

Richard earned three NCAA titles (all-around, high bars and parallel bars) at the NCAA Championships staged on the Penn State campus last week, becoming the third gymnast in school history to do so, and collected five All-America citations in the process.

A close finish in the floor exercise against Stanford's Nick Kuebler separated Richard from tying the modern NCAA record for titles in one event (4). Both scored a 14.800, but Kuebler won the tiebreaker with a higher execution score.

As a team, the Wolverines placed second with a team score of 419.889.

“There were so many at once," Richard said of the emotional rush. "Definitely a lot of pride and satisfaction. I train every day in the gym and push myself, and (it's rewarding) to see it finally pay off.”

Tracing Back Stoughton Roots

Richard's gymnastics journey began at 4 years old as he watched his older sister, Alexandra, on the mat.

There was no boys gymnastics squad as he ascended to Stoughton High, so Richard spent a bulk of time training at the Somersault Center in town, where he met trainer Tom Fontecchio, who Richard says he "owes everything to."

After training at the Somersault Center for over a decade, Fontecchio suggested that Richard was "outgrowing the gym," so he switched to MEGA (Massachusetts Elite Gymnastics Academy) in Millis at 14, where he trained for the ensuing four years.

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“It took up a major section of my life," Richard said. "I feel like I wasn’t involved in too many school things, not really any at all, because of being so involved in club gymnastics. It’s a whole separate entity. Most of my time was spent there. It worked out well for pushing me in the sport of gymnastics, but I do wish that one day that schools can start implementing gymnastics to get more people into the sport. It would’ve been a different environment if I could’ve done it in high school.”

As a teenager, Richard suffered a fracture in his back as a result of overuse and excessive arching and was out for six months. He recovered, and was sidelined again shortly after, due to a similar injury in a different spot in his back, but “in that period of my life," Richard said, "there wasn’t a thought in my mind that I wouldn’t go back to gymnastics.”

“It made me think about the sport and why I do (gymnastics)," Richard said. "There is a lot to sacrifice; a lot of harm that can be done from it. I realized how much I loved it from being away from it for so long. When I came back into the gym, I treated it like a privilege and not just something I did. I took advantage of every moment. … That’s what made me work harder than other kids, stay consistent and take advantage of the opportunity I had.”

To cap his time in club gymnastics, he became a United States Senior National Team and, as a senior, placed second on high bar, third on floor, and fourth in all-around at the 2022 U.S. Gymnastics Championships.

A Freshman Season to Remember

He took his club accolades to the University of Michigan this winter.

Not only was his first go-around of collegiate gymnastics encapsulated by the gathering of three trophies at the end of the NCAA Championships last week, but Richard was named Freshman of the Year in the Big Ten conference and received the All-Around and High Bar titles at the Big Ten championships, plus all-conference First Team honors.

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“It just motivated me more to keep pushing," Richard said. "It means a lot of big things can happen in the next three years of college.”

Michigan finished 19-12 overall, plus a second-place finish (among six teams) at the NCAA Championships.

Learning experience, much?

“One hundred percent," Richard said. "The biggest learning experience was becoming a team player over an individual. The sport of gymnastics isn’t a team sport – it really isn’t at all – but college turned it into one. I went from years and years of training for myself, by myself a lot of the time, to having 24 amazing gymnasts pushing me in the gym and I learned to make sacrifices for the team and want the best for the team.”

Using the platform

To spur his social media blow-up, Richard has posted an array of content that spans between footage of meets and behind-the-scenes action with teammates at the Wolverines' practice facility.

He posted one of his most popular TikTok videos in May of last year, and it received 9.1 million views, and over 400,000 likes. Last week, in the wake of the NCAA Championships, he posted a video that garnered 3.3 million views and 623,000 likes.

“I wonder, ‘How did this even happen?’" Richard said with a laugh. "It feels like the sport chose me, and chose to change my life. That’s why I want to give back to it so much. It’s kind of funny – you never know where you’ll end up.”

Richard said he uses his platform with the intention of growing boys/men's gymnastics across the country. Maybe one day, he hopes, enough new participates will join for more youth and high school teams to form and survive.

“It has helped in terms of bringing awareness to the sport, but I do see there is so much further to go,” Richard said. “I’m definitely not satisfied with where this sport is right now, I feel like we are not growing. We’re kind of stagnant, or even dying.

“A lot of people think the Olympics is my biggest goal, or biggest opportunity in my life, but I feel like that’s just the starting point of the journey," he said. "My biggest goal is to turn this sport around because I feel like no one else is really pushing for that.”

10-year-old Richard, dangling from on the high bars in Stoughton, would be proud.

Said Richard, “He’d definitely be very surprised” at how this is all unfolding.